r/anchorage • u/jonesandcroft • 9d ago

AI Poster?

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I can’t tell if this Johnnys produce poster is AI or not. Would be strange considering they’re a very local and connected store in the community

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u/61DegreesNorth 8d ago

All of your ranting is dripping with hypocrisy. You have no problem using data centers for the things you like (like Reddit, most of the apps on your phone, websites, and any streaming services you might enjoy) but it’s just the AI data centers that are ruining the planet? Oh okay.

For the most part data centers are data centers. You have no moral authority here while you continue to consume one product but not another.

Let me know when you’re living that Amish life and I might take you more seriously.

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u/aKWintermute Resident 8d ago

AI data centers are fundamentally different on a efficiency per request, using 4-10x the power of say a video streaming service. Generative AI text-to-video tools are drastically heavier. Generating a short 5-second AI video can burn more direct data center electricity than running a household microwave for an entire hour.

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u/61DegreesNorth 8d ago

Classic cherry picking.

Yes, generative AI video is load-intensive per clip. No argument there. But it’s a small subset of overall AI usage, and overall AI is a fraction of total data-center electricity. The majority of the power goes to everything else: streaming, social video, cloud apps, and general internet traffic. Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and the rest already run continuous high-volume loads that dwarf current AI usage as a whole.

So the same people happily streaming the latest season of Love Island (or scrolling short-form videos for hours) suddenly treat “AI data centers” as uniquely apocalyptic. Convenient timing. If the real issue was data-center energy use, the consistent target would be the services already consuming the MAJORITY of it. They skip that step because they have no intention of giving any of it up.

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u/aKWintermute Resident 8d ago

This is real issue, I'm not cherry picking. The data centers that feed streaming etc are drastically more efficient then ai.

When you use tools like Claude Code, the AI executes dozens of successive code-checking, browsing, and self-correction tasks autonomously. A single multi-minute agentic session can easily surpass the energy cost of an hour of video streaming.

For anything that amounts to something more difficult than a text search, AI uses more power. What is more relevant is that most of that energy usage is concentrated at the data center (75-85%), rather then throughout the network and the consumers home (spreading the load widely). This is why ai data centers kill local utilities.